Conference Agenda

The contemporary vision of the city of Lisbon in the first half of the eighteenth century and its architectural features owe much to musical iconography, particularly the art of tile making. The 1755 earthquake, which destroyed much of the city, radically transformed its architecture, and its reconstruction under the Marquis of Pombal reshaped the urban landscape into the form it has today. This paper maps and analyzes musical iconography in tile panels depicting architectural spaces in Lisbon, arguing that music plays a central role both in visual ornamentation and in the evocation of urban soundscapes. These sources allow us to reconstruct and reinterpret the city as it was experienced. The study combines iconographic and organological analysis using established methodologies, including those of Panofsky, Seebass, and Rocha. While examining architectural reality and the role of music within it, the paper shows how these representations combine elements of documentation and imagination. The influence of engraved decorative motifs circulating across Europe is reflected in these panels, contributing to artistic innovation and visual refinement. The presence of related panels in Bahia further reveals the dynamics between Portugal and Brazil, where colonial relationships facilitated the circulation of artistic models between Europe and Latin America.

Museum collections of Asian art in Portugal encompass, alongside extensive holdings of decorative arts, a rich body of musical and performance-related material that remains largely underexplored. Existing studies—focusing on instruments, phonographic records, iconographic materials, and stage objects—demonstrate that Asian sonic and theatrical traditions have functioned as vehicles for moral, sociopolitical, and cultural expression, while reflecting global dynamics of exchange. However, these approaches address only a small portion of this material and are often conducted without the linguistic and cultural specialization required for its full interpretation. This paper presents a mapping of primary sources for the study of music in China and Japan, based on two research projects grounded in Asian Studies, and argues for the need to integrate linguistic and cultural expertise into musicological analysis. It draws on materials from the Fundação Oriente and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, including libretti, propaganda posters, scores, sound recordings, and ukiyo-e prints depicting musical practices and performance. The analysis demonstrates how these sources open new perspectives on the social and political functions of music in China and Japan, as well as on the media through which it circulated. They also provide a basis for examining the reception and transmission of these practices in Portugal and Europe. The paper argues that a more comprehensive understanding of these collections requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines ethnomusicology with Asian Studies. Without this integration, the musical, social, and political dimensions of these materials risk remaining obscured by predominantly Western interpretative frameworks.

This paper argues that the reception of iconographic representations of the five senses in colonial Brazil reveals tensions between local practices and broader Western traditions. These representations draw on a complex ideological framework that combines peripatetic, pseudo-Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic traditions with a wide range of Renaissance sources. Engravings by artists such as Georg Pencz and subsequent engravers, together with Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, played a central role in shaping this visual and conceptual tradition. Engaging with scholarship by Carl Nordenfalk, Chiara Stefani, Sonia Maffei, and others, the paper undertakes a comparative bibliographic analysis of ekphrastic and iconographic traditions related to the five senses across Europe and the Americas. Through this approach, it situates colonial Brazilian examples within a broader transnational network of visual and intellectual exchange. Rather than viewing these materials as isolated or purely local phenomena, the paper demonstrates that they participate in a larger tradition of sensory representation across the Western world, revealing processes of adaptation, reinterpretation, and circulation that extend from Europe to Latin America.